Tail-End Charlies

“A breathtakingly intimate look at the lives, loves, and deaths of the brave airmen” who flew the controversial last battles of WWII over Germany (Walter J. Boyne, bestselling author of Beyond the Wild Blue).

Night after night they flew through packs of enemy fighters to drop the bombs that would demolish the Third Reich. The American and British airmen of Bomber Command were among the greatest heroes of the Second World War, defying Hitler in the darkest early days of the war and taking the battle to the German homeland when no one else would.

Toward the end of the conflict, too, they continued to sacrifice their lives to shatter an enemy sworn never to surrender. Blasted out of the sky in an instant or bailing out from burning aircraft to drop helplessly into hostile hands, they would die in their tens of thousands to ensure the enemy’s defeat. Especially vulnerable were the “tail-end Charlies”—which, for the Americans, meant the last bomber in a formation, and for the British, meant a bomber’s rear-gunner who flew operations in a Plexiglas bubble.

Following their groundbreaking revelations about the ordeals suffered by Allied prisoners of war in their bestselling book, The Last Escape, John Nichol and Tony Rennell tell the astonishing and deeply moving story of the controversial last battles in the skies of Germany through the eyes of the forgotten heroes who fought them.